Hasta La Gadget!

While there are blind painters who are able to create masterpieces, have you ever wondered about the rest of the blind or visually impaired population and how they appreciate art? Considering that they cannot see, and since most paintings have a “no touching” policy, it would be almost impossible, right? Well looking to change that and allow the blind to enjoy pieces of art just like everyone else, a group of Harvard students have embarked on a project called “Midas Touch”, which essentially takes advantage of 3D printing to allow the blind to “see” pieces of art.

The concept behind Midas Touch is simple – regular flat images, such as Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, are printed in 3D with layers of texture on top of it to help the blind or visually impaired “see”, or rather feel, the art. It should be noted that this is purely theoretical at this point and that the team is currently working on prototypes to prove that their idea has merit. After all, braille has been designed to allow the blind to read, so couldn’t something similar be done for art as well? The team is currently trying overcome some hurdles, one of which involves color, as in how do they translate color into a feeling. Pretty cool stuff and we can’t wait to see where they can take it.

[Image credit – Evgenia Eliseeva]

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After Facebook and its 1 billion plus users, Twitter is perhaps the most widely used social network. Back in December Twitter announced that it had more than 200 million monthly users. Today at a conference WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum revealed that the popular cross platform messaging service has more users than Twitter. Confirming that they had more users than Twitter, Jan however did not reveal any specific figures which will obviously be over 200 million. He also revealed that WhatsApp handles some 12 billion outbound messages and 8 billion in bound messages every single day.

Recently we were hearing rumors that Google was willing to acquire the service for up to $1 billion, these rumors were quickly shot down by Neeraj Arora, the business development head at WhatsApp. Today Jan touched on this subject as well, saying that they wanted to build a sustainable and independent company, to build a business and that acquisition is not really a viable exit strategy for them. While Twitter and WhatsApp are in two entirely different niches, it is interesting to see just how quickly a cross platform messaging service has gained a surge in its user base.

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The smartphone used to be a safe environment to develop for, especially in its early days when there was no such thing as malware or viruses, or other kinds of malicious code. Well, times have definitely changed over the years, where the explosive growth of smartphones have led to numerous “backdoors” being discovered in mobile operating systems, and it seems that there is a concentrated effort in developing malicious software for the Android platform in this season.

Mobile security vendor NQ mentioned that the total number of reported Android devices infected with malware grew from 10.8 million in 2011 to 32.8 million in 2012, while would translate to a 300% increase year-over-year, with nearly 95% of malware detected in 2012 being limited to the Android platform, which means that Google’s mobile operating system is almost the de facto target for potential cybercriminals. Interestingly enough, majority of the mobile malware infections reported happened in China, India and Russia. You know what to do to stay safe – download only apps that are certified and from official sources.

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We’ve seen some impressive guitar mods in the past couple of months as we’ve seen one that is shaped like an NES, while another types out certain keys on a computer depending on what notes you play. But have you seen guitars that are are to look like the Millennium Falcon, a Y-Wing and a B-Wing from Star Wars?

These guitars were created by 64-year-old Tom Bingham for himself as he has said he doesn’t plan on selling them. Each guitar took Bingham around three months to build, which he has a total of 20 other guitar designs, a number of which have nothing to do with Star Wars such as his chessboard guitar and his vinyl record guitar. His Millennium Falcon Guitar was used by attaching the neck of a guitar to a replica, which he also equipped with flashing LEDs in the back to give it a “hyperdrive look.” (more…)

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Today Microsoft has released a new update of the Skype for Windows Phone 8 app. The beta tag that previously accompanied this app has now been dropped in the latest update, which brings the version number up to 2.5. Despite that, there aren’t any substantial new features in this update. The new Skype for Windows Phone 8 version 2.5 is now available for download from the Windows Phone Store.

The new app update primarily brings general improvements and better reliability. Various bugs have been fixed which plagued both chat and video chat, they’ve also fixed some crashes. The only new tweak in this update is the change of handling of Messenger buddies in the app. The Skype app now be default displays message notifications for Messenger buddies. Microsoft hasn’t clarified one thing, since Windows Phone 8 has Messenger integrated, wouldn’t this mean that users will get notifications from both the Skype and built in Messenger apps? Perhaps the company has disabled the integrated Messenger app’s notifications? The company has yet to say something on this matter, we’ll let you know when they release an official statement.

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